I would feel like the king of the world if I knew what that meant or there was such a thing.
Gripped by isolation for a prolonged period, I grip back and take hold. I embrace the solitude, turn it into a positive – just for now.
I feel in control, not controlled, but know it won’t last. It’s a beautiful day though and for a change I decide to live in the moment and I head off in a different direction than usual. Something I maybe need to do in life.
I take in the glory of the Aire Valley and beyond, the views stretching way beyond Skipton towards the Lake District and, the other way, towards once prosperous Keighley, the fields a patchwork of various greens, the landscape dotted with villages in which factories once provided employment for locals.
There’s a ‘Public Footpath’ sign. Generally these are seen as positives, though I tend to interpret them as warning us commoners to ‘stay off the rest of the land’.
I head along the path anyway and something tells me I am approaching the abandoned house my brother and I had been talking about just the day before. We used to go there as kids, the building empty, spooky, a sense of danger, its ghosts hidden in the surrounding woods. By the entrance to the driveway still sits a disused reservoir, its walls long ago breached, the water tumbling down the now sunburnt fields.
Unlike the scene in my novel The Choreography of Ghosts when Michael Morrison enters an abandoned mansion on the Amalfi Coast, I don’t ignore the ‘Private’ sign and climb over the gate to investigate, instead choosing to walk further along a route I haven’t followed in perhaps 45 years.
I commiserate with a dead shrew, observe the beauty of butterflies of which I am ignorant of the species, and look across at the new builds that have added to the wealth of the already wealthy.
Around me there’s bracken, gorse, trees I can’t identify, thousands of years of nature… I feel I have escaped. I don’t see a soul and for that I am truly grateful.
I turn back as I have been out for a good while, and stop again by the gate to look along the path leading up towards the house, which my mum said hadn’t been inhabited since she was a child and used to play in its grounds. I traverse the outskirts of the woods in an attempt to see more, but the building (assuming it is still there), enveloped by the long-established woodland, does not reveal itself.
What else is hidden in these fields, their nearest settlements established prior to the compilation of the Domesday Book? Did William the Conqueror look across this valley and offer a brief nod in appreciation of its beauty as his men scorched and emptied the lands in their harrying of the north?
Unlike the people who inhabited this then green but not so pleasant land almost one thousand years ago, at this moment, for the first time in a long while, I feel free. I feel alive. Then I remember, this can only be temporary as real life beckons once more.